Big East deserved more NCAA minutes

Only three teams made the field but all are still alive.

UConn coach Dan Hurley

In the mid-80s there was no more powerful and polarizing basketball conference than the Big East. Its teams spent 40 minutes in each other’s faces, and the world’s in general.

It had flamboyant and contentious coaches, players who brought street wisdom and road rage to the lane, and a lascivious urge to beat up outlanders when it was NCAA tournament time. Georgetown, Villanova, Syracuse and Connecticut won national titles, Seton Hall lost a championship game on an imaginative foul call, and three of them — Georgetown, Villanova and St. John’s — got to the 1985 Final Four. The Hoyas were defending champs and often won games in warmups, but their finals opponent was Villanova, which had already felt Georgetown’s heel on its neck and was irrationally unafraid. The outcome, of course, was a record for field goal percentage in the NCAA tournament, and one of the most renowned upsets in the sport’s history.

Then the Big East imploded, thanks to university administrators who were infatuated with football. When it was reinvented, it consisted of Catholic institutions at which men’s basketball was the main attraction. And it still played in big markets and, for the most part, professional arenas. Amazingly, it dominated again, with Villanova winning two more NCAA titles. When Connecticut wriggled out of the American Athletic Conference and came home, as it were, it won the school’s fifth NCAA title in 2023.

This Big East might not have been feared but at least thought it had earned respect. That assumption was dashed on St. Patrick’s Day, which is not a trivial occasion in Big East cities but was ruined when the tournament selectors chose only three teams: Connecticut, Marquette and Creighton. That was five fewer bids than the SEC got, and three fewer than the Big Ten and, if you want to know how grotesque this really was, one fewer than the Pac-12 and three fewer than the Mountain West.

Now the field has been drained from 68 teams to 16. A quarter of those teams are from the ACC, but the Big East trio is 6-0. Connecticut continues to play in its own orbit. The Huskies have won their past eight tournament games by an average margin of 21.8 points. Marquette, with point guard Tyler Kolek healthy and dealing, held off Colorado in the second round, and Creighton played deep into the Pittsburgh night to eliminate Oregon Saturday.

The only Big Ten survivors are Purdue and Illinois. The only Big 12 survivors are Houston and Iowa State. The only SEC survivors are Tennessee and Alabama. This, of course, has nothing to do with the four months of regular-season basketball that defined the conferences. You don’t undo those months with one wacky weekend. It should be noted that the Oakland Athletics won two of three over the Atlanta Braves last summer, too.

And the selection committee gets second-guessed enough, no matter how many teams they pick. The foolishness of those who think the Yales, James Madisons, Grand Canyons and Oaklands are somehow unworthy squatters in the tournament grid, and that more seventh and eighth place teams from the TV conferences should be granted entry, was exposed, as it is on an annual basis.

And, in one sense, nearly all the 362 teams in Division I are in the tournament anyway. If they’re in a conference tournament, they can win it and keep playing. That’s what Duquesne, North Carolina State and Oregon did. They all celebrated by winning an NCAA game, and N.C. State won two and will play Marquette next. 

But there is no coherent explanation for what happened to the Big East in the boardoom eight days ago.

The committee relies on the NET ratings, which replaced the old RPI. It divides the 348-school membership into four “quads” and gives weight, supposedly, to Quad 1 wins.

Providence was only 58th in the NET but it had six Quad 1 wins. It beat Marquette once and Creighton twice. The Friars did lose 13 games and were 7-6 down the stretch, but it’s difficult, in hindsight, to see how they were judged inferior to Virginia, which did beat Florida and Texas A&M in the pre-holiday segment of the schedule but lost seven games by 19 or more points, including its First Four atrocity at the hands of Colorado State. The Cavaliers ranked 54th in the net and had only two Quad 1 wins in nine tries.

St. John’s was ranked 25th in the NET and was considered safe by the bracket analysts. Rick Pitino’s club was 4-10 in Quad 1s. A Nov. 13 loss to Michigan probably hurt, but who knew on Nov. 13 that Michigan would be a 24-game loser, and what does that have to do with March anyway? The Red Storm had a six-game winning streak when it ran into UConn in the Big East tournament, and only lost to Dan Hurley’s wrecking crew by five points. But its name wasn’t called. At least you can’t accuse the committee of catering to the big markets.

Seton Hall was 67th in the NET but was 5-8 in Quad 1s. A 20-12 record, including a loss to Rutgers, was easy to overlook. But the Pirates did beat UConn, and did so by 15 points, and knocked off Marquette, Providence and St. John’s, too. The committee observed that Donovan Klingan, the imposing sophomore center for UConn, was hurt in that loss to the Hall, but the Pirates didn’t have Kadary Richmond, their best players, in two of their losses.

Mostly, the committee sounded as if it reached decisions and then tried to justify them, not the other way around.

It’s the first time in 10 years that a league has sent three or more teams to the tournament and had them go undefeated in the first weekend. Some have said the Big East proved the committee wrong. That’s not exactly right. The committee was wrong regardless of what happened next.

“Obviously a mistake was made,” said Hurley, who played at Seton Hall. “It sucks.”

Spoken like a son of the original Big East. The attitude might have skipped a generation, but the basketball hasn’t.